The fi rst effort to make the Internet accessible to less geeky types was called gopher. Gopher was developed for use on terminal screens. It offered a very nice interface to the net. A user could move up and down along the screen and pick choices by highlighting a topic and pressing the enter key. When a useful document was presented, another press of the enter key downloaded it to your local terminal.
Unfortunately Gopher didn't really come into it's own. In this age of mice and windows, users demand mo re, MUCH more than a simple terminal based interface. Think of Gopher as DOS SHELL or PCTOOLS to the Internet. Better than DOS, but nobody uses them any more.
Enter Hypermedia. If you have ever used Hypercard on the Mac or a Windows help file you know all about hypermedia. It is a method of presenting a user with text (or other things) that can be clicked with a mouse. There are two different types of text presented, normal text which is to be read, and highlighted text which can be clicked (or i nvoked somehow).
So, now that you are bored to tears, the World Wide Web is a hypermedia interface similar to Hypercard or Windows Help, to the Internet. A user is presented with text, pictures, movies, sound and just about anything someone can dream up, that is clickable. So the Internet has finally become something people can use. Much to the despair of the geeks...